Who to contact

Use the contact details at the top of any letters we’ve sent you or use the Who to contact details below.

What happens next

If we’ve made a mistake, we’ll put it right as soon as possible and apologise immediately. If you’ve experienced unfair treatment or suffered financially, we may consider making a special payment to you.

If you’re not satisfied with our initial response, or we need to investigate further, you can ask for your complaint to go to a Complaint Resolution Manager.

They will contact you, usually by phone, to talk about your complaint and agree how to investigate it. They will contact you again within 15 working days to tell you the outcome or when you can expect a response, if it will take longer.

If the Complaint Resolution Manager doesn’t resolve your complaint

If the Complaint Resolution Manager doesn’t resolve your complaint, we’ll ask you if you want your complaint to go to a senior manager. If you agree, the senior manager will ask for an independent internal review of your complaint. They will contact you within 15 working days to tell you the outcome or when you can expect a response, if it will take longer.

If you’re not satisfied

If you’ve been through all our complaints stages, received our final response and still aren’t satisfied, you can ask the Independent Case Examiner (ICE) to look at your complaint. You must contact them within 6 months of getting our final response and send them a copy of it.

The Independent Case Examiner can’t look at matters of law or government policy. They won’t look at benefit or maintenance decisions, for example, because you can appeal against these.

If they accept your complaint, they will look at what happened and what we did about it. If they think we should have done more, they will ask us to put matters right. They will act as an impartial referee and you will not be charged for their service.

Service standards

Complaints and appeals are different

We can’t treat a complaint as an appeal against a benefit decision, overpayment decision, child maintenance assessment or sanction.

If you think the decision is wrong, you can ask us to explain it to you. We’ll send you a written statement of reasons, if you ask for one. If you understand the decision but still do not agree with it, you can ask us to look at it again – this is called a ‘mandatory reconsideration’. You must explain why you think the decision is wrong and include any evidence you have to support this.

For some decisions, you may be able to appeal to an independent tribunal, which can change the decision if it agrees that it is wrong.

There are time limits for asking us to look at decisions again and for appealing.

There is more information about appeals and time limits in our appeals guide.

Complaining about an organisation that provides a service for DWP

Other organisations sometimes provide DWP services, for example Work Programme providers. If you’re not satisfied with the service you’ve received from an organisation like this, complain to them first and give them a chance to put the matter right. If you don’t agree with their response, they must tell you how you can take your complaint further.